Be still my red reader's heart

Yippee! After several months of yearning (see earlier posts here and here), I finally have in my hot little hands a copy of The Crab-Canning Ship by Takiji Kobayashi, translated by Frank Motofuji and published along with another Kobayashi novella, The Absentee Landlord, by the University of Washington Press as The Factory Ship in 1973.The Crab-Canning Ship is the story of a struggle by shipboard workers horribly exploited by the crabbing and processing industry. Its 1929 publication caused a sensation in Japan, and drew the imperial government's attention and enmity, driving Kobayashi underground. In 1933 undercover police agents trapped him, captured him, beat and tortured him and, when he refused to squeal on his communist organizer comrades, murdered him. Fast forward to 2008-2009: the book is in the midst of a huge revival in Japan, where its message of class struggle resonates with masses of young workers facing cuts, takebacks, layoffs, rising prices, all the ills of the deepening capitalist economic crisis.

After some floundering, I managed to track down a copy, which I now have on a one-month inter-library loan. Oh how I wish to own this book. But reading it will have to do. I'll get to it after I finish Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which I'm about three-quarters of the way through and loving. I look forward to blogging about both books as wonderful refutations of the literature-can't-be-political dogma.

My response to Mr. AYW, part 1

When last we left the Acclaimed Young Writer, he had contacted me to ask how I liked his book, then, after I'd politely criticized it, responded with an eight-paragraph lecture on why "reading as a communist," as he paraphrased my stance announced in the subtitle of this blog, "shouldn't be part of art appreciation." His treatise expounded on the aesthetic bankruptcy of looking at art, let alone creating it, based on a political point of view. Here's my earlier post recounting our correspondence.

Because it was a private email exchange, I'm not naming him, and I won't extensively quote him either. A friend suggested I invite him to make his comments public, to sort of debate me, here. But I'm not doing that. He is an Acclaimed Young Writer. He gives lots of readings and interviews and has all kinds of outlets to speak and write his piece. His opinion on the topic of political art conforms to the conventional wisdom; it's propagated everywhere and anywhere by him and by most other prominent writers and writing teachers. In fact, the "art and politics are antithetical" viewpoint is pretty much the only viewpoint anyone in this country ever gets exposed to. Me, in contrast, I'm an obscure writer who's claimed this teeny tiny corner of the blogosphere as a place to air my dissenting point of view. He gets to spout his bourgeois-masquerading-as-neutral spiel everywhere but here. Here, I speak my proletarian piece.

Mr. AYW's anti-political-literature argument in his email to me opened with a bizarre, reactionary (and misspelled) attack on a short story writer for her "reverse-mysogyny," then rambled about a bit before alighting on the main point, that "using political considerations to determine a reading experience" is wrong, and concluding that a political approach is "not an aesthetic position I have a great deal of sympathy with." To buttress his argument he quoted Bellow, Kundera and Woolf. Shockingly, this trio--the scrivener of the middle-class white male experience, the professional anti-communist, and the brilliant bourgeois whose progressivism didn't extend to relations with the servants--all agree with Mr. AYW.

The position, boiled down, is that true art can have no political viewpoint. That creativity cannot spring from any political purpose or express any political ideology. And that it is equally impossible to appreciate art from any but a non-ideological approach.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It's the position of the entire arts establishment in this country. Well, almost. A writer you might have heard of sees things differently.

Because it's been a while since I wrote here about this whole question of political art, and because the points I want to make will take some time, some thought, and some blog space, I'm going to make those points in a series of posts. Starting today, with points number one, two and three.

Virtually every time I've ever seen the case made that a politically conscious approach to art is illegitimate, and this certainly applies to the case made by Mr. AYW, it relies on three logical (actually political!) bases. None is explicitly stated. Each is assumed to be understood. Each is mind-bogglingly wrong.

1. The argument that true art can't be political is not really made as an argument backed up by reason or evidence. Rather, it's an assertion, backed up by--nothing! It is presented prima facie, as though the assertion needs no proof because it is self-evident to any reasonable person. Actually, the more I review the standard cant the more I'd say that almost always it merely amounts to this. Art can't be political, obviously! Mr. AYW's email, including its citation of quotations, was a prime example of this approach. None of what he wrote me, and none of his "expert" backup, amounted to anything but stating, and re-stating, and re-re-stating, the assertion, as though reciting it frequently enough magically makes it true.

2. This is a variation on #1 but it's worth noting separately. The anti-political-art assertion amounts to a tautology. A tautology, as in my favorite example from the Bill Clinton presidency, is a logical fallacy in the form of a circular argument: thus-and-so is true because so-and-thus is true. In Clinton's case, when he signed the viciously anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and was asked why he opposed same-sex marriage, he said, "I'm against same-sex marriage because marriage is between a man and a woman." Tautology. Similarly, Mr. AYW and his ilk rely on the tautology that true art can't be political because, why?, well, because if it's political it can't be art. How's that for deep thinking!

3. The entire position against a political approach to art claims to be above the fray--posits itself as apolitical, as it has to in order to not appear baldly hypocritical--when in fact the argument itself is deeply, in fact entirely, political. It is not an argument equally against fascist and working-class art although it may claim to be. Who ever defends fascist art and must be answered? No, it is an argument against working-class, or class-conscious, or, heaven forfend, communist art. It is the argument of the class in power, the ruling class, the capitalists, against the exploited class, the workers. The position that art cannot be political is a position for the status quo, which is an utterly political position. This is so even if the arguer doesn't realize that she/he is arguing for the exploiting class, even if she/he denies it. How can that be? I'll delve deeper in future posts.

Weekender linker-upper

There will be a part two, a substantive follow-up, to the recent "My Correspondence with Mr. AYW soon, but I can't promise how soon. The question of a political approach to literature is the crux of this blog, its whole reason for being, and another direct address of this question is due. Not today, though.

Today begins the three-day weekend that culminates in a national holiday to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Today too the awful crisis in Gaza continues. Some links relevant to both:

• The latest post on the blog of novelist Tayari Jones, who just returned from leading a women writers' workshop in Uganda, recounts her experience delivering a lecture there to a packed auditorium on "The Legacy of the Legacy of Martin Luther King" and especially the fascinating Q&A that followed. Comments were provocative and wide-ranging and included her being "called on the carpet for the imperialist foreign policy of the U.S." Her conclusion: "At the end, it was just so clear to me how much more informed people in other countries are. I cannot imagine an American audience with such a broad understanding of the history of another country."

• Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi maintains a great, up-to-the-minute blog called Poetic Injustice, which I've added to my links list.

• Another worthwhile blog I've just learned of is poet Philip Metres'. It's called Behind the Lines: Poetry, War & Peacemaking, with the subhead: "Further thoughts on the cultural labor of poetry and art. Not 'is it good,' but 'what has it accomplished?'" This blog has featured a lot of interesting news and links during the Gaza crisis.

• In cities around the country, opponents of the genocidal, U.S.-funded-and-armed Israeli war in Gaza will mark Martin Luther King day in what we believe to be the spirit of Dr.King's legacy, by marching in protest. A good number of those marchers will be, like me, Jews. There has been an amazing outpouring of support for, and over a thousand people have signed on to, the statement by Jews in Solidarity with Palestine. Among those who have signed are a holocaust survivor, a 1933 refugee from Germany, and even a resident of a kibbutz.

"The fierce urgency of now"

While the national holiday honoring him is this coming Monday, January 15 is the actual birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He would be 80 years old this year.

I just read through his historic speech against the Vietnam War. In this speech at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967--exactly one year to the day before he would be assassinated while in Memphis to support the sanitations workers' strike--he spoke passionately about "the fierce urgency of now" in calling for an end to the war. Both his stance against the war and his support of the workers' struggle reflected the direction in which he was moving, toward linking up the civil rights struggle with all movements for social justice and liberation. Many are convinced that this is why he was killed.

No one can know what Dr. King would be doing and saying if he were alive today. But when I read his April 4, 1967, speech I can't help but think that the people of Gaza would find a friend in this great fighter for freedom and equality. I can't help but think that what he said about Vietnam he would also say about the current assault against Palestine, which is fully funded by U.S. tax dollars.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. ...

Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world.

In what I believe to be the spirit of Dr. King, the spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood, of solidarity with the suffering and oppressed, and in dedication to his memory, I'm posting this link to a statement just issued by Jews in Solidarity with Palestine.

Art & commerce, force-fed

When you live in New York, the ubiquitous, inescapable, non-stop assault of the crud of culture--that is, advertising--is such that you become mostly inured to it. Or at least I have, at least to some extent, over my 26 years in the city. You ignore it as best you can. The subways of course are lined with ads, some eye-catching and clever and as such constituting an occasional slight diversion from the drear of the commute, most of them dreadfully insipid and insulting--to the eye, the intelligence, the spirit. Just lately the MTA has begun lining the outside of the trains as well as the interior with ads, so you can't even stand on the platform and zone out in peace without enduring the visual assault of BUY ME BUY ME BUY ME. (Despite all this ad revenue, and the outrageous $2 fare we pay, and the millions and billions of tax dollars we also pay, we riders are about to be hit with another round of combined fare increases and service cuts. Not to be matched, it can be assumed, with any respite from Madison Avenue's onslaught.)

For someone like me, for whom the hour or so of riding to and from work provides the day's only guaranteed reading time, there are other annoyances, like being pummeled from all sides by the unbelievably loud tinny, bass-thumping blare emerging from the earpieces of every other rider's iPod. Let me not wax on about this, however, lest I lean too far in a grumpy old curmudgeonly direction.

The ads, though. They're everywhere, not just the trains and buses. Giant posters plastered to every wall. TV sets, which are basically ad-dissemination machines, blaring no matter where you go: bank lobby, doctor's office, diner, and now even inside taxi cabs. Ack! Oh please, can I have no peace?

You get my drift. Now picture this. Last night I was heading home after marching for Gaza. I'd taken the 8th Avenue train down to 42nd Street, where I would transfer to the #7 to Queens. Walking that long tunnel eastward from the Port Authority end to the Times Square station. I'd just looked up to see the first sign in what is a real actual instance of pleasing public art--a series of signs in the manner of the old Burma Shave roadside ads (!), only this isn't an ad, it's a sort of a poem, call it the plaint of the every worker; it goes something like 'here I am, trudging to the train, I'm so tired, another day's work, wish I could go home,' only much more clever and poetic. It always makes me smile. Not last night, for just as I was starting to read the poem-sign-series, I noticed a corridor-long, eye-poppingly designed, colorful set of ads for the HBO series "Big Love." Not just any ads, though. These are interactive. They feature a series of photographs of people on the streets with balloons saying "listen to what I'm really thinking" or something like that--and a plug-in post for iPod earphones. Sure enough, many many people, mostly young folks, were being drawn, like zombies to living flesh, to the big glossy pretty talking ads, and plugging in, and listening, and laughing, and pointing, and drawing yet more people to plug in, and listen, and laugh, and point, and draw in more ...

It's not enough that we're force-fed advertising for every useless, overpriced (and offensive, as in the case of "Big Love," a series about those lovable if quirky guys with multiple wives) product everywhere we go. Now we are expected to take action to plug in to the ads. To become consumers not only of the products they advertise but of the ads themselves, as if the ads themselves are a new form of public art. To not only consume, but conspire with the advertisers to lure in other consumers, and on and on. Oh lordy, shoot me now. Then somebody says, ah what the hell, that's capitalism, and we sigh and nod and go on about our lives.

Gaza on my mind links

Soon I'll post my response to the Acclaimed Young Writer's critique of a political approach to literature. In the meantime, here are some links relevant to what's really pressing on my mind these days, the genocidal Israeli/U.S. assault on Gaza.

Poets for Gaza
Friday, January 16, 7 p.m. at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South in New York City: join poets Roger Bonair-Agard, Marty McConnell, Vaimoana Niumeitolu, Tahani Salah, Remi Kanazi and Urban Word NYC youth poets for a night of stimulating and invigorating spoken word. More poets to be announced! All proceeds from this fundraiser will benefit the people of Gaza directly through the registered 501c3 organization, United Palestinian Appeal. Spread the word and bring your friends! For more information, contact: Remi Kanazi at remroum@gmail.com

Queers Without Borders is a blog, or I guess a kind of blog of blogs by progressive LGBT people, that I recently learned of, which features a number of items regarding support for Palestine.

While I have managed to get back to writing as per my new year's pledge, and am currently revising a short story having to do with Jews and Palestinians, I've also been doing some other writing, including a statement by Jews in support of Palestine and against Zionism. When and if that goes public I'll post the links. In the meantime, though, I'm very happy to have learned of the existence of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. Such a grouping is very much needed to break the monopoly of Israel's supporters and apologists who claim to speak for all Jews. Speaking of which, yesterday I took part in another NYC protest of the Israeli war against Gaza. This was again a big demonstration, at least 15,000. We gathered in Times Square for a rally, then marched to the Time Warner Center and rallied there to protest CNN's disgustingly one-side pro-Israel coverage.

Finally, turning for a moment away from the subject of Gaza, here's an editorial in Workers World newspaper about the selection of reactionary pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at President Obama's inaguration. Full disclosure: I wrote it.

From Athens to Oakland

On New Year's Day in Oakland, Calif., a police officer shot in the back and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed young Black man, as he lay prone in a BART subway station, pinned down by two fellow cops' knees. Several onlookers videotaped the murder; the following is one view.



Now, as they did in Athens, Greece, last month, and as they will whenever the state commits an atrocity against oppressed youths, young people in Oakland have taken to the streets in protest. Today the news is full of headlines about Oakland "rioters," at least a hundred of whom were arrested last night. But really, can anyone equate justifiable anger at killer cops and some damage to police cars with the racist murder of Oscar Grant?

My correspondence with Mr. AYW

Not long ago I had an email exchange with an Acclaimed Young Writer, a successful novelist, a regular on the readings circuit whose several books have won critical lauds and sold well. He initiated it with a note telling me that he'd chanced across this blog, was enjoying it, and was happily surprised by a mention here of one of his books. (That mention is no longer up.) He said he hoped I liked his book and to let him know.

In fact I had just finished reading his book, and had just finished thinking about whether I would blog about it. I'd decided not to, partly because I was sick with the flu and didn't feel I could write as clear and thoughtful a posting as I should. Now, having received an email from the novelist himself, I thought about whether I should answer his question honestly and tell him what I thought of his book. Probably my mulling about this wasn't all that clearheaded, given the fever and all. Probably I should have just let it go. I didn't. I decided instead to send him a substantive reply including my reservations about his book.

Those reservations centered on this white writer's treatment of Black characters, one in particular. So, while praising his writing, and yes, he's a good writer, which he already knows, I criticized his handling of race. My criticism was rather gentler than it would have been had I gone ahead and blogged about the book (although, having now read several reviews and articles about the book and the author I can conclude that apparently no one else has even raised a peep about this issue, which I find appalling though not surprising) but I did express it. My email was courteous and respectful but it did not demur from saying what I thought.

Soon enough my inbox showed another email from the acclaimed young writer. His reply to my reply held to my courteous, friendly tone. He thanked me for my "kind words and thoughtful response" to his book and responded briefly and, to his credit, not terribly defensively to my critique. Then he got to the meat of things: an eight-paragraph-long treatise, complete with quotations from several of the bourgeois literary pantheon, on why a political approach to reading, and even more so to writing, is a fallacious and indefensible aesthetic position.

Well my my.

Where did that come from? He, after all, had asked me what I thought of his book. I'd never asked him what he thought of my reading habits.

He had not, in fact, simply chanced upon my blog. He'd found it in the course of a google search of himself, actually a google search of his name plus the phrase "best books of 2008." This I know from the service that tracks visits to my blog. Yes, Mr. Acclaimed Young Writer was hungrily searching for more acclaim. Can't fault him for that, and so what? Writers are a notoriously neurotic lot; if I ever manage to get my novel published I'll no doubt search high and low for any hint of praise. Once he found his way here via the google search, he pored over the site until he found one little mention of his book (again, it's no longer up). My hunch is that, singlemindedly searching for his own name as he was, he had not in fact looked at this blog very carefully at all, let alone been enjoying it, before he emailed me. This blog whose title is "Read Red" with the subtitle "ruminations on the reading life of a communist." Once he'd received my communist reader's criticism of his book, however, he sized me and my blog up and decided to school me on what a sorry, shoddy approach communist reading, let alone class-conscious writing, is.

And thus ended my correspondence with the author of what several critics did indeed find one of the more noteworthy books of 2008. It will take another post, which I hope to get to soon, to address the substance of his stance against political fiction, unoriginal, tired and steeped in bourgeois sensibility as it is. His argument hews faithfully to the line espoused by the entire literary establishment; since one purpose of this blog is to oppose and expose that line for what it is, and since I haven't done so explicitly in some time, by golly I'll have to step up to the plate.

There's another topic buried here, which I'll also try to bring to light soon. It has to do with my own relationship to literature in the abstract and, concretely, to actual writers. Such as the actual author whose email started all this, or the one whose book I read and loved and emailed asking if I could interview her for this blog but who never replied, or the ones who've ignored my requests that they link to my blog, or the ones who have read my (critical or laudatory) posts about them and their books but not contacted me; and the ones who do link to me and do reply to my queries and are open to the thoughts and ideas of a red reader. Such as, also, the state of my so-called career as a writer and what effect this blog will have on it. It took me years to stop worrying about how blogging as a communist reader would muck up my chances at publication and just make the leap, and I'm not worrying about it any more, not exactly, but I do think about it, by which I mean I think about the whole question of writing and publishing and politics and activism and, well, that's what this whole damned thing is about, isn't it, so this is, as always, to be continued.

I don't think Mr. AYM is still checking in here, red reading being so decisively not his cup of tea, but I'm grateful to him for giving me much to think and blog about.

Jews in solidarity with Gaza

1.The following is excerpted from a CanWest newswire report from today, January 7:

Eight women protesting Israel's military action in the Gaza Strip have occupied the Israeli Consulate in Toronto and are refusing to leave, police said Wednesday. ...

In a news release, the group said: ``This action is in protest against the ongoing Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. The group is carrying out this occupation in solidarity with the 1.5 million people of Gaza and to ensure that Jewish voices against the massacre in Gaza are being heard.''

... The news release says the group is demanding Israel end ``its military assault and lift the 18-month siege on the Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid into the territory.''

... The protesters said they want to ``send a clear statement that many Jewish- Canadians do not support Israel's violence and apartheid policies.''

2. There are several good books out there by Jewish opponents of Zionism. One that I read a few years back is The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick. A similar book that I haven't yet read but have heard good things about is The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman Finkelstein. Both these books, as their titles indicate, debunk the efforts by apologists for Israel to win support for the settler state based on a cynical appropriation of the legacy of Jewish suffering under Nazism. Both debunk the lie that there is any connection between Israel and the Holocaust, and demolish any claim Israel could possibly make to justify itself based on the Nazi genocide. (One interesting and little-known fact from the annals of the Zionist movement, which historically was always reactionary and had almost no support among the mass of Jews before World War II, is that in its beginning days in the 19th century, as Herzl and the other early Zionists were casting about for a likely piece of land in which to locate their hoped-for Jewish state, one of the areas they eyed was southern Africa. Ultimately, negotiations with the British racist colonialist Cecil Rhodes fell through, and he went on to name the British-controlled settler state that was set up based on the murder, theft and suppression of the native African nations there, after himself: Rhodesia.) Finkelstein has several other books, including Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, that I hope to read. He's a gutsy guy, most recently in the news a year or two ago for being booted out of his university teaching job because of his political views.

"Farce & sheer ignorance & worse"

Monday-back-to-the-grind briefs:

• New York state writers, there are only 10 days left to get in your applications for a summer 2009 residency at the Saltonstall Foundation. I had a month there last summer working on my new novel, and I can vouch for it: the place is heavenly. Don't think you've got a chance in hell at being chosen? Neither did I. Don't have an MFA, or connections, or fancy publication credits? Neither do I. But I got in. Maybe you will too. Give it a shot!

• Second thoughts on cell phone novels. At first I felt kind of foolish for having speculated recently on the potential literary value of this new genre, which is currently riding a wave of popularity, especially among young women, in Japan. Then I got to thinking about the question of form, and how it doesn't interest me much at all. Content is the issue. As a reader my quest is always for books that reflect or illuminate one or another aspect of the class struggle, which, contrary to what the literary establishment would tell you, is a capacious approach since the class struggle encompasses all the world and all its peoples, every life and every aspect of life. It seems to me that there must be myriad ways of doing this with words, including forms not yet even imagined. So back to cell phones: they may be currently used in service of vapid and unoriginal romance tales, but might someone write something else on them? What about a worker on strike? Could she be moved while on picket duty to cook up a story that conveys the heat and heart of a fight for wages and benefits? What about a worker on the job, using break time to tap in imaginings inspired by days spent pushing hospital gurneys or typing legal briefs or tagging pigs for slaughter? There are so many obstacles to prevent workers from creating literature. Is it impossible that new technology, yes, even cell phones, might end up providing a way forward?

• Tony Christini has posted some new thoughts about what he calls liberatory literature over at A Practical Policy. For a much more learned take on this than you'll ever get from the likes of me, check it out. Here's an excerpt:

Overt liberatory revolutionary fiction is so anathema to the lit establishment that it is filtered very much out, de facto censored. This is no game of who is more progressive than whom - it is an institutional and normative analysis of what is tolerated and encouraged by the establishment, and what is not. It is no game that so much of the lit establishment in the US virtually writes central, great liberatory novelist Victor Hugo out of history, particularly in lieu of Flaubert (a prominent MFA, political, and formalist establishment favorite), though it’s pretty close to farce and sheer ignorance and worse.

"There's nothing brave about oppressing"

As promised, I'm posting below a few pictures I took at Saturday's New York demonstration in support of the suffering people of Gaza. First, though, check out what poet Remi Kanazi had to say there.



Remi is the organizer and editor of Poets for Palestine.



These guys on the left are from an orthodox Jewish grouping that rejects Zionism and stands in solidarity with the Palestinians. They've made some beautiful statements about how massacres and racism are anathema to Judaism. Their religiosity creeps me out, but their humanity is righteous: they made an exception to their Sabbath rules to take part in the Saturday demonstration because Israel's attack on Gaza constitutes a crisis about which they believe they must not remain silent. As for an atheist like me who identifies with my people's heritage of fighting for the oppressed, a heritage horribly besmirched by the Israeli state, the sign at the right says it all.

Marching for Gaza

On Saturday I marched through midtown Manhattan alongside some 25,000 others, the great majority of them young people, in defense of the Palestinian people and to demand an end to the criminal, murderous Israeli assault against and siege of Gaza. I took pictures with my cell phone and got a few decent shots, but because of my cheap, horribly slow online connection I've been unable to get the photos posted here on the blog. For some reason I'm also having trouble even posting links to some other sites with photos and video of the demonstration. I'll try to get the pix and links up as soon as I can. In the meantime I'll just say that for me personally, walking across 42nd Street with so many courageous, determined Palestinians as well as people of many other nationalities, all of us together raising our voices for justice and liberation, was the best possible way to start a new year of struggle. It's terrible that it is necessary. But it is necessary. And so we begin again.

Cell phone novels

This won't be an erudite consideration of deep questions about high culture and low culture, because (1) I'm just emerging from a flu and still somewhat bleary-eyed and brain-clogged, (2) even if I were at my peak, erudition isn't quite my specialty, and (3) high and low are false and meaningless categories of culture. What interests me is how culture reflects, advances or retards the class struggle.

Which is why I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of the cell-phone novel. No doubt I'm late in learning about it, courtesy of a piece in the Dec. 22/29 New Yorker, but now that I do know I'd like to know more. For those even further behind than me: cell-phone novels have been sweeping Japan. They are written mostly by young, even teenaged, women, who write the stories, yes, on their cell phones. In cell-phone-ese, complete with the Japanese equivalents of LOL, OMG and so on. Apparently the tales are brief soap operas, some autobiographical, some fantastical, most falling squarely within the romance genre. The authors write them on their cell phones and post them onto web sites from which readers, primarily other young or teenaged women, can then read them on their cell phones. These stories have become so popular that they are now being picked up by conventional publishers and printed as books, which in turn become huge bestsellers.

The New Yorker article is awash in the undertone of condescension that's typical of coverage of non-European cultural issues, so I don't trust it beyond factual accuracy (if that) and won't draw from it any conclusions about what's going on with Japanese books. Particularly when I know that at this very same moment one of the biggest bestsellers in Japan is The Crab Canning Ship by Takiji Kobayashi, a 1920s novel about workers toiling in miserable conditions on a factory ship that was instrumental in persuading the imperial regime to execute its communist author. This reissued novel has struck such a chord throughout Japan that this past summer a mass strike rally had the theme "We are all crab-canning ship."

So I'm not buying some petit-bourgeois U.S. commentary about the lamentable state of Japanese letters as exemplified by the rise of cell-phone novels. Now, I'm not going to launch a defense of them as the great new proletarian form, either. Japan is a rich imperialist country whose means of cultural expression are owned by big capital just like here, "art" is produced primarily for profit just like here, works that lull the working class and dull the impulse to struggle will always be promoted just like here. But I can't quite bring myself to denounce this new form as a form, either. There is nothing like a literary novel, in my opinion, no other means to explore with as much depth and subtlety the vital questions of human life and struggle; still, there may be other entries or short cuts along the way, should some practitioner find a method of employing them to address the meaty issues. Perhaps it's foolish to even speculate about cell-phone lit ever doing that, but it wasn't long ago that no one would have imagined graphic novels being taken seriously either. We shall see.

In any case, no form can ever surpass the U.S. cinema for scraping the bottom of the cultural barrel. Stuck at home sick as I've been, I've watched a number of movies and I've got to say there seems to be no limit to the dreck Hollywood can dish out. "Mama Mia"--my goodness, what a train wreck! "The Dark Knight"--could this drivel have droned on for a few more hours? "Sex and the City"--need I even comment?

This is a no-brainer

New year resolutions aren't my favorite gimmick, but today an imperative decree for 2009 is, well, decreeing itself to me.

Write!

Yes, I've managed to spend what was to have been a productive week and a half off work, what were to have been 12 days of solid writing, what was to have launched me back into a good creative groove--to spend it instead zoned out with the flu and its aftermath, lying around, reading a bit but mostly simply existing on the lowest possible level, I'm talking the Lifetime channel and HGTV and "Entertainment Tonight." This is frustrating. This is also motivating. This must be the end of a fallow period that went on for far too long, occasioned by a series of minor but intrusive bodily troubles since the end of the summer. So OK now. It's a new year now. It's time to get going now.

Twelve days of writing would have launched me forward into a natural, self-sustaining rhythm. But since it was not to be I'm going to do something unnatural, artificial: resolve. And so I do. My new year's resolution is to write two to three days a week after work and both days every weekend, from this point forward.

I'm looking at you, eight to 10 unfinished stories. I'm looking at you, new novel waiting to be written past page 65.

I need to get my body in shape too. Exactly like Oprah, who is exactly my age (um, did I mention I've done nothing but watch TV for the last week? ask me anything about Hollywood, I'm your answer gal), I got down to just the right weight a while ago only to pile 40 pounds back on. The fat makes me sluggish. Sluggishness obstructs writing. Obstructions to writing must be removed.

On with it.

A poem for Palestine

From all accounts yesterday's New York demonstration in solidarity with the people of Gaza against the murderous Israeli bombing assault was, although called at the last minute and held without a permit, strong and spirited, drawing 3,000 to 4,000 people to stand with Palestine. Now a new coalition of New York/New Jersey groups has been created. It's the Break the Siege on Gaza Coalition, and it has announced plans for another, bigger demonstration this coming Saturday, January 3. I'm hoping I'll be well enough by then to go. I feel awful about missing yesterday's protest. In the meantime, here's a statement by the youth group FIST on the Gaza crisis. And here's one from the International Action Center.

For a more literary take on the Palestinian struggle, check out the recent anthology Poets for Palestine. There's also the Arab-American literary journal Mizna.

Probably the greatest honor so far in my writing life is that Mizna published a poem of mine a few years ago. In lieu of my physical presence at the protests until I get over this flu, I'm reprinting it here, dedicated to the memory of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died this past summer and whose voice is sorely missed at this moment.

Homeland

This is the Palestine poem I've needed to write for 30 years
to atone for cheering for Israel, '67, age 13. These are the lines
where I finally come clean: how I swallowed the tripe, even
as I grew, once I saw, I learned, once I'd heard about Deir Yassin.
I was scared to move, to cross the boundary from family, home,
all I knew, all they'd taught me it meant to be a Jew. That land
is ours, Mom said, given by God (in whom we don't believe);
it's safety, we need it, said Dad, after what we've been through,
it's ours by right, it's a guarantee. You can't change sides. They
threatened. They cried. They thundered: you'll kill us. You
won't be forgiven, they warned, you'll have torn us apart.
They said it would be a sort of suicide, a death of the self,
but they lied, and this is the poem where I tell the truth: that
massacre and theft disgrace my roots, that I claimed my future
by taking my stand with Palestine.

So this is the poem I owe--for the stolen land, for the
bulldozed homes, shattered bones, a nation scattered but
undiminished despite the blows. For Dearborn diaspora's rage,
for Right Bank slingshots, for elders who cling to keys
and dream of houses they were ousted from. For the
uprooted olive trees. This is the poem I have to write--
after curfews, checkpoints, the odious wall, after worst jobs,
insults, racist abuse, the buried babies and shortened lives--
these are the lines of sorrow and shame at the crimes that are
carried out in my name. This is the poem for Yafa, Ramallah,
Jerusalem, Jenin, for Nablus, Samakh, the towns that were
razed and those that remain. For these are the words of a
wandering Jew who dwells in the promise, the oath, the pledge,
the fist raised for the right of return, the shoulder against soldiers
rifles tanks. And this is my hand, my heart, my voice, the way
I chose and will never regret. And this is my vow to the cousins
who yearn for the beloved, unforgotten, unrelinquished place.
For the day that will come. For the great wrong reversed.
Yes, this is my duty. Yes, this is the poem it's an honor to write.
Yes, this is my love for Palestine.

Gaza & the weapon of literature

Stand with Gaza
Having barely emerged from my sickbed over the last few days I decided to check in on the world, only to discover the sickening, horrific news that today the Israeli settler state launched a series of murderous attacks on the Palestinian nation, bombing over 100 sites in Gaza. The initial death toll, mostly civilian, is 200, with 600 wounded. The massacre has of course generated immediate outrage--and rage--worldwide, and an upswelling of sympathy and solidarity for the suffering people of Palestine, who had already been enduring a brutal blockade in Gaza. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has called for protest actions; I'm sure these will break out quickly. I'm sorry I'm too sick to attend the demonstration that will no doubt be called in New York, because I feel a special obligation as Jew to always disassociate myself from the criminal Zionist state and reiterate my loyalty to the oppressed people struggling for self-determination. Long live Palestine!

Update: Subsequent posts about Gaza and Palestine can be found here and here and here.

Christini on Winterson and Ngugi
In response to an item I posted last week about Jeanette Winterson, Tony Christini of A Practical Policy emailed me the following note, which I post with his permission:

Per usual, I've been continuing to keep up with your thoughtful weblog. Just wanted to note that while the Winterson quote is wonderful, litblog co-op has equally pithy quotes by Ngugi wa Thiong'o that go much further, in my view.

I really appreciated Winterson's novel The Passion, far and away her best fiction, to me, though I haven't read her recent fiction.

Ngugi's accurately self-described global epic novel from Africa, Wizard of the Crow (2006), is easily among the very best, most vital, most important works of contemporary fiction, rare, seems to me. As one Amazon reviewer noted, accurately I think, we would be lucky to have such a work from the U.S. I've written just a little about it thus far (some of which I may be reincorporating soon on my weblog). Such a work from the U.S. (or one that goes farther sociopolitically) would have to be fought for, I think, in a variety of ways.

Tony points us to his lengthy piece "Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel" for more of his thoughts on this.

Ngugi on the responsibility of literature
That Litblog Co-op item Tony referenced above includes a series of fascinating quotations from Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Here are two that really speak to me:

Fiction cannot be the agent of change. The people are the agent of change. All writers can do is really try to point out where things went wrong. They can do no more than that. But fiction should be firmly on the side of the oppressed. Fiction should firmly embody the aspirations and hopes of the majority--of the peasants and workers.

and

Literature is indeed a powerful weapon. I believe that we in Africa or anywhere else for that matter have to use literature deliberately and consciously as a weapon of struggle in two ways: 1) first, by trying as much as possible to correctly reflect the world of struggle in all its stark reality, and b) secondly, by weighting our sympathies on the side of those forces struggling against national and class oppression and exploitation, say, against the entire system of imperialism in the world today. I believe that the more conscious a writer is about the social forces at work in his society and in the world, the more effective he or she is likely to be as a writer. We writers must reject the bourgeois image of a writer as a mindless genius.

Flu

Yesterday, the first day of my wintry week and a half off of work, I woke up sick. Goddammit! I'm all achey and fevery and congested, good for nothing but lying on the couch watching TV. What a way to waste my first few days off. My best friend, who's an elementary school teacher, told me she was sick last week for the start of her winter break too. It's famous, she said, that we in the education field get sick over the holidays. It's as if our bodies were holding out to the bitter end, then collapse as soon as they can. Well okay, sure, fine, but must I be included as "in the education field"? I'm a university secretary, not a teacher. The worst part is that I'd planned to start reading Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Now I have to put it off. I have to be alert and clearheaded to enter those pages.

Reminder: read African-American authors

Earlier this month I plugged "National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month," the sort of tongue-in-cheek but mostly serious and definitely needed campaign initiated by author Carleen Brice. This is the final reminder. Go do it.

I will, except that the "somebody not Black" I'll be buying the books for is me. There are also a number of works by Latin@, Arab, Asian and African authors on my to-read list. Especially since it seems that the last couple books I've read were by whites, I'll be looking beyond the mirror as I head to the bookstore.

Bookstores, that is! Between my bosses and my family, this holiday season I snagged a major, major trove of bookstore gift certificates. When I close up the office this afternoon and begin my 12-day winter vacation (one of the few perks of working for a university), my first stop will be to start using them up. Then it's home to read.

To read! The other big gift I got from my job this year--presented with much hoopla at their annual holiday banquet--is a Palm Pilot. I've spent the last couple weekends entering data, trying to reorganize my life from datebook, phonebook, notepads, sticky notes, miscellaneous slips of paper, etc., consolidating it all in one centralized gadget. It's working, I think. Perhaps the most radical revision is my to-read list. It has now morphed from several crazily typed-and-scribbled-upon folded and refolded sheets of paper that I carry on my person at all times to a clean, neat and easily updated list that I still carry on my person at all times but can now call up, consult, revise with a touch to the screen. You can't read the titles because the cell-phone photo is fuzzy but this is a section of my to-read list pictured here.

Which I'd all along planned to post today, but now feels a little copy-catty because Maud Newton also has a photo of a reading-related gadget posted on her blog, though naturally hers is a sharper photo and a much more snazzy and expensive piece of technology. Her post is about reading novels on an I-Phone.

The inaugural poet

My ignorance about poetry is vast though I am trying bit by bit to correct that. In the meantime I must admit that I have not read any of the poetry of Elizabeth Alexander, who will read a specially written new poem at the inauguration of President Obama. I'm intrigued to see that one of her books of poetry is titled The Venus Hottentot, especially because Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Hottentot Venus was one of the best books I read in 2008. The story of Sarah Baartman is excruciatingly sad, epitomizing much of the pain and horror of European colonialism in and racism toward the nations of Africa. I'm interested to read it through the prism of poetry.

As to her inaugural assignment, Ms. Alexander says:

This is a powerful moment in our history. The joy I feel is sober and profound because so much struggle and sacrifice have brought us to this day. And there is so much work to be done ahead of us. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us toward transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words--and the worldviews--we live in.

Two from Tayari

Yesterday Tayari Jones posted a thoughtful piece headed "Time to Break the Mirror" on her blog. It's well worth reading for what she has to say about who reads what, who should read what, to whom books are marketed, to whom books should be marketed, all this with particular regard to literature by African American and women authors. Her take on these issues really resonates. I would so much rather be stretched, challenged, taken to new places, and, most of all, learn at least a little bit about what the world looks like and feels like to someone with a very different life experience than mine, than read something that merely reflects back my own limited consciousness. I agree with Tayari: reading should not be about looking in the mirror.

Speaking of mirrors: yikes! Thanks also to Tayari, I now realize how much what I see there has changed over the years. Here's my high school graduation photo, from 1972.
Embarrassing as it is to share this picture, it's for a good cause, rising to the challenge Tayari has posed to bloggers to support Girls Write Now! This organization pairs New York City high school girls with writing mentors. So here's a wee bit to help, across the miles and years from a nerdy hippie Detroiter of yesterday to hip New York writers in the making of today. Thank you, Tayari, for your generosity. I hope to help more with my own donation soon. Right now things are rough.

My employer is about to hit us with a new round of health benefit takebacks as of the new year; as one who's 36, going on 37, years past high school graduation I find myself awash in medical bills lately. My job is secure, I think, which is a lucky break in these tough times. If I can only keep my body functioning all will be well. As for you fresh young talents of Girls Write Now: write well! Write on!

A few words from Jeanette Winterson

As far as I can tell, this isn't posted online so I can't link to it, but in today's New York Times Book Review the "Up Front" piece focuses on Jeanette Winterson, who reviews a novel in this issue. I like what she has to say about art and creativity and class.

Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off and educated. I know that from my own story, and from the evidence of every child ever born--they all want to hear and to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to paint pictures, to make sculptures. This is born in and we breed it out. And then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, and at the same time we either fetishize art--the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility--or we ignore it. The truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, and that is a heritage and a birthright of all our lives."

Her review is wonderfully written, too. Time for me to revisit her novels. I've tried twice and somehow haven't been able to connect with her writing, bad lesbian reader though that makes me. Perhaps the third try will be the charm. I really really want to join the ranks of fans of her books.

Man, I'm sick of this

One of my unending and probably hopeless quests is to understand more about the natural world. From time to time I read a book that, in language supposed to be comprehensible by non-scientists, promises to teach me something about material reality. Physics, astronomy, geology, biology. The degree of success--that is, how much I actually do understand and, more important, retain--varies. When it comes to astrophysics, I sometimes get what I'm reading while I'm reading it, as with Simon Singh's very good book Big Bang, but a week or two after finishing the book I'm hard pressed to be able to explain much that I thought I'd learned. My best success comes in reading about evolution, which, not coincidentally, is the topic I find most fascinating of all. For the most part I really do get it (I think!). I thoroughly enjoy reading about it, and have for many years, from the days of the Leakeys' books about their work in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and Donald Johanson's books about the discovery of the 3-million-year-old hominid mother of us all whom he and his team dubbed Lucy (that's her below), to more

recent works including Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (except for the disgusting anti-affirmative-action rant he felt compelled to include). Two summers ago I went back to the big daddy of them all, Charles Darwin, and read The Origin of Species, which to my surprise I found to be completely accessible, an extremely enjoyable, engrossing read.

But.

With rare exceptions, science writers still refer to homo sapiens as "man." And so, even as I feel my mind expanding as I read these books, I'm also seething, cursing, gritting my teeth page by page. And I'm not just talking about old papa Darwin, writing 150 years ago. I'm talking, for example, about a book I just read, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Is there any excuse for a book published in the year 2007 to characterize a species that consists of two sexes--that in fact is majority female--to call that species "man"? Hell no, there is not. What is wrong with these people?

Not all these people, thank goodness. Some writers of popular science books do nod to reality by referring to humans or people instead of man, and by not using male pronouns exclusively as a generic stand-in for our mostly female species. Best of all is the secular saint Natalie Angier, my favorite contemporary writer about the workings of the natural world. Ms. Angier is a science writer for the New York Times; whenever I see her byline, usually on a Tuesday in the Science Times section, I print out the story and take it home to savor over the weekend. I've read and loved two of her books, Woman: An Intimate Geography and The Canon. I find the way she thinks about and explains science very winning. Man, that's no lie.

The Crab-Canning Ship Redux

Of the 70 posts thus far on my still quite new blog, the one that has generated the most hits is this one, from October, about the reviving popularity of the Japanese book The Crab-Canning Ship by communist author Takiji Kobayashi (seen at left), who was killed by the imperial government in the 1920s. Not only is Kobayashi's novel now a bestseller in Japan, but there is burgeoning worldwide interest. People from many countries have found their way to my blog after googling the book's title.

To all of you Nigerians, Koreans, Brazilians, Danes, Australians, etc., who are interested in reading this book, I have two words: me too! I've been having a hard time getting my hands on the English-language edition. It's long out of print, as far as I can tell. There's one used copy being offered online, but it costs $48 and that's out of my league. I thought the university library here had it, but when I found the book listed, it's actually not quite the same. This one is called The Cannery Boat By Takiji Kobayashi and Other Japanese Short Stories. Thoroughly perplexed now--is the short story that opens a collection some condensed version of the novel or what?--I went back into the library's online listings and discovered that this university does not in fact own a copy of the novel I'd been looking for, the edition published by UNESCO and the University of Tokyo Press. But I may be able to get my hands on it via inter-library loan from whichever other school does have it. I've put in my request. Now the wait.

If any of you others have any information on how to get the English edition of The Crab-Canning Ship, preferably how to buy it but not at exorbitant prices, please drop me an email at shelleyettinger AT yahoo DOT com and let me know. In turn I'll share whatever I hear here on the blog. Better yet, some smart indy press ought to come out with a new edition for the new era of working-class struggle that's in its opening stages.

Check 'em out

Here's a crop of zooming-toward-year's-end links:

• Maybe you should get off your tuchas and walk to the bookstore to buy those holiday gifts for the readers on your list. A writer for the Times of London went undercover to work at Amazon.co.uk's warehouse during the holiday rush season, and found abysmal working conditions. Not that life is particularly good for bookstore workers, either, but there may be some limit to how horribly the bosses can treat them since they're there in full view. The heads-up on this came from Moby Lives.

• Short fiction published online will now be eligible for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Stories. My first few years of publication were all online, including what I think is one of my best stories. I was too scared to submit to fancy-shmancy print journals. Actually, some of the online journals are very very good, have stringent editorial processes, and publish fine work, so this is a long overdue step. Now if only they'd change the title of the series--people from Caribbean, Central and South American nations consider it the worst kind of chauvinism when U.S. entities use the word "American" in an exclusive sense. The news on the BASS change came from Practicing Writing.

• "Why are most of your stories so lifeless and irrelevant?" "Why do you mostly publish fiction by men?" "When you do occasionally publish something by a writer of color, why is it always accompanied by some weirdly exoticizing illustration?" Hey, these are just some examples off the top of my head. I'm sure you can come up with better questions for New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Go here to send them.

• It's a familiar pitfall in the reading lives of people of color and of whites with even a modicum of consciousness about racism. You're buzzing through a well-written novel, enjoying it immensely--until, slam, you ram up against some offensive portrayal of Black, Latin@ or other characters who are from other than the middle-class white milieu the author clearly considers the norm. You try to give the author the benefit of the doubt and you keep reading, but no, here it comes again, and again, and you throw the book down in disgust. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, whose novel The Dirty Girls Social Club I really liked when I read it some years ago, has posted a provocative, incisive critique of popular writer Jodi Picoult and her racist, stereotypical treatment of Black and Latina characters on her blog. That was several days ago; since then Picoult has responded and Valdes-Rodriguez commented further. The alert on all this came from Tayari Jones' blog.
  

• Finally, check out the lament of an "oilan," a sharp dig at U.S. imperialism by Tony Christini at A Pragmatic Policy. And while you're at it, go sign the petition demanding that the "Iraqi government"* set Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-throwing journalist, free.

*"Iraqi government" is so-called because Iraq is an occupied nation with a puppet apparatus fronting for the real rulers, the U.S. military.

José Sucuzhanay presente!

Because I was under the weather over the weekend, I didn't make it to yesterday's demonstration in Bushwick, Brooklyn, about the December 7 beating death of José Sucuzhanay by a group of men shouting anti-gay and anti-Latino slurs. Teresa went. She reports that a couple thousand people marched. It was less than a month ago that she went to Long Island for another march about another Ecuadoran immigrant who was beaten to death by a gang of youths.In his blog, poet Eduardo C. Corral points to a poem by C. Dale Young in the Spring 2004 Virginia Quarterly. The title is "Torn."

Farewell gift to a mass murderer

I am in awe at the courage of Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi, who threw two shoes at George W. Bush at a Baghdad news conference yesterday. With the first throw he yelled, "This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is a farewell kiss, you dog!" With the second, "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!"

Brother al-Zaidi is no doubt being tortured at this moment and we shouldn't be surprised if we soon hear he's dead. In contrast, the butcher of Baghdad (and before that, of Black and Latino prisoners on Texas' death row) will soon slink off to a cozy retirement. That's for now. The long view shows an accounting coming, down the road.


In the meantime, the shoe thrower's bravery has prompted an outpouring of anger at the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq throughout that country.

My year's best

I'm not very good at keeping up my books list over at goodreads.com -- I often forget to record books I've read, and I usually forget to note when I've read them or else enter the dates wrong -- so looking over my list of books there is a wholly unreliable way of finding out what I actually did read in 2008. Nevertheless I gave it a once-over, and it appears that I've read about 40 books so far this year. That's well below my usual. The shortfall is due to the nearly two months I mostly couldn't read after my cataract surgeries. What's not recorded is the depressing number of books that I start reading but don't finish. I think I'm getting harder to please as I get older, or maybe less patient, I don't know, but I do believe that on average I start and stop two to three books for every book I finish nowadays. (One result is that my books-read list on goodreads looks crazily skewed toward four- and three-star reviews; that's what happens when you only read through to the end if you're loving it or darned near.) Just these last two weeks I've already started and stopped three books, while I finished just one. I just can't force-read anymore. Lately my rule has become rather harsh: if I don't wake up first thing in the morning dying to get back to the book I was reading the night before, it's not worth returning to. Too cranky, right? But there are so many books and I've no time to waste on any that don't enthrall me.

Posting this is a bit premature as I can expect, barring some disaster, to read several more books this month, especially during the holiday break, and chances are high, I think, that a certain one of them will turn out to be the best book I read this year. I feel like doing this now, though, so here are my favorites among the books I think I read so far this year.

Fiction:
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
Wild Nights! by Joyce Carol Oates
Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

Nonfiction:
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier
My Life by Fidel Castro
Low-Wage Capitalism by Fred Goldstein

Read Black, red readers!

Novelist Carleen Brice, whose book Orange Mint and Honey is on my to-read list, has been running a brilliant campaign calling on readers who are not Black to buy books by Black authors. She's dubbed December "National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month." Now comes the video, which is funny and gently biting. Check it out, and then get to the bookstore and buy books by Black writers for all the readers on your gift list this holiday season.

Thank you to novelist Tayari Jones for reminding us, especially us whites, to get on board with this. It's something no red reader should need a nudge about, but consider this your nudge just in case.

How cool is this!

I just bought Toni Morrison's new novel. I hadn't rushed to get it because I knew I wouldn't be able to read it until at least the holiday break, but today I just couldn't wait any longer so I went and got it on my lunch hour. And wow! Lookee here! Okay, I know it's a horribly fuzzy cell phone picture, but that's Toni Morrison's autograph on the inside cover! I somehow lucked out and got a copy that she'd signed!

(I took off the book jacket and laid it on top of the opened book for authenticity or something. Never said I had any visual design sense.)

Three for four

A short story of mine was just accepted for publication by Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. I'm very happy, both to be published in a lit mag of this caliber, and because that makes three story acceptances this year, all by high quality journals. In fact, this means that three out of the four stories I sent out this year are in the pipeline for publication, with only one still dangling. Nice.

The story Nimrod will publish was a risky one for me to write, a real stretch. When the publication date approaches I'll go into more detail about how and why.

The start of something big

My attention is naturally drawn from fiction to the real world when sisters and brothers like these take action to rewrite the plot dictated by the banks and corporations. As most people know by now, the mostly Latin@ workers at Republic Windows and Doors have been occupying their Chicago workplace since Friday night in a fight to defend their jobs and wages against the company and its backer, Bank of America, which would together have summarily shut the plant and stolen the wages and benefits due. Company after company simply ignores the federal law requiring 60 days' notice before a plant closing. This time the workers, members of UE Local 1110, decided to enforce the law themselves.

For ongoing updates as this struggle unfolds, check out this UE site. For information about nationwide demonstrations against Bank of America set for tomorrow, December 10, go here.

A book I recently read and have plugged several times here, Low-Wage Capitalism, has a whole section about the tactics that are necessary in this period, and prime among them are sit-down strikes and plant occupations of the sort we haven't seen since the 1930s--until now. Workers owe a big thank you to the women and men who have led the way by taking over Republic Windows. This could be the start of something big!

Meanwhile, a broader news watch is in order, too. The governor of Illinois has been arrested for corruption. Irrespective of the substance of the case, can the timing possibly be unrelated to the Republic plant occupation? He was arrested immediately after taking a surprisingly strong stand in support of the workers and announcing that he was canceling all state of Illinois business with Bank of America.

"You were always among us"

This past Friday evening I was walking up Fifth Avenue just above 14th Street when I recognized Sean Ono Lennon as he walked past me, talking on a cell phone. I was immediately transported to memories of my youth, much of which I lived to the soundtrack of his father's--and his mother's--music and words. He looks so much like his father it's uncanny. And now today, December 8, is the 28th anniversary of the killing of John Lennon.

My story "John and Yoko and Rowena and Me" is due to be published any day now in the Fall 2008 issue of Cream City Review. It's a first-person fiction but, although it's set in Detroit and later New York and although the main characters are my age, it is not autobiographical. Unlike the main character of this story, who has moved to New York and rushes up to the Dakota to stand vigil the night John dies, I was a bus driver in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I remember that I worked an afternoon run that day and I didn't get home until after 11 p.m. Almost as soon as I walked in the door, the phone rang -- remember, no cell phones back then so you weren't in constant contact with everyone the way you are now -- and it was my best friend telling me that John was dead. I remember being surprised at how upset I was.

There is what from all accounts is a lovely spot called John Lennon Park in Havana, Cuba, where folks sit with this statue. At the dedication ceremony in 2000, Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon gave a touching speech about the hopes and dreams of the 60s generation. "Dear John," he said, "you were always among us."

A working-class hero is something to be.

Mountaintop removal & publishing consolidation

Pretty soon I may post a list of my favorite books of the year. By which I mean my year, the books I read in 2008, not books published this year. Between waiting for them to become available at the library and/or waiting for them to come out in paperback, it's rare that I get to read a book hot off the press. Anyway, one of my absolute top reads this year was Strange As This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake.

I was reminded of this wonderful novel by an alarming story in yesterday's New York Times. It seems that the horror show of last-minute rule changes the Bush administration is rushing to add to its eight-year-long list of atrocities includes a rule that, according to the Times, "gives coal companies a legal right to do what, in the past, they could do only in exceptional circumstances." The rule will facilitate and encourage the coal industry's horrific move toward wholesale mountaintop removal--that's right, mountaintop removal, where coal companies simply blast off the entire top of a mountain to get at the coal underneath--by permitting the resultant toxic runoff to bury valleys and destroy rivers and streams.

Pancake's novel is a wonderful example of how fiction can raise readers' consciousness and even, one hopes, move them to action. It's about a family in the West Virginia coal country whose lives are disrupted, devastated, by mountaintop removal. The wrenching story opened my eyes about how people's health and the beautiful green hills are being destroyed and moved me to learn more about the ongoing struggle to stop Big Coal. The novel is an example of something else, too: how political fiction can rise to the absolute highest reaches of art. What Ann Pancake does with language is a new and beautiful thing.

For more about how communities are organizing against mountaintop removal, this website is a start.

Meanwhile, in Manhattan...

The landscape may be the glass canyons of New York, not the mountains of Appalachia, but there's plenty of wreckage draining down the city's streets this week in the wake of an orgy of restructuring in the publishing industry. For a blow-by-blow of at least the most evident of the carnage--editors sacked, imprints erased, authors in limbo--the blogs Moby Lives and MediaBistro/Galleycat are good starting places. It's not easy, however, to find the true extent of the bloodletting, by which I mean the layoffs and wage cuts and benefit takebacks affecting the thousandfold work force that includes not only those who sit at desks in the skyscrapers but also those who manufacture and distribute and sell the books and for that matter those who cut the trees and process the paper and also all the related low-wage high-tech workers in cities like Bangalore and Manila to whom much of the labor is no doubt being shifted. Yet it's not hard to see what's happening. This is an industry that had already spent much of the last two decades consolidating. Hence company names like Houghton Miflin Harcourt. Hence every imprint from Doubleday to Knopf to Crown to Shocken actually being part of the monster that is Random House. Hence every previous wave of layoffs and cuts.

The only raison d'etre for any capitalist enterprise is profit. The only means to profit is by exploiting labor. In a time of financial crisis brought about by overproduction, in publishing as in every other industry, the only option to maintain profitability is to ramp up the level of exploitation. Fewer workers doing more. Squeeze 'em for every penny.

The spectacle du jour is the Big Three auto CEOs (with their loyal lackey Ron Gettelfinger at their sides) demanding their due on Capitol Hill. Tomorrow, who knows, it might be the book biz's biggies. If he were still alive, would the sainted Bennett Cerf be dancing to big money's tune? He'd have to, or be out of a job.

We've lost another giant

Odetta, one of the great political artists of our time, has died.

A comrade reminds me that in early 1981 she performed at a benefit at the Village Gate to raise funds for the first mobilization against the Reagan presidency, the May 3 march on the Pentagon against U.S. intervention in El Salvador and to defend Atlanta's children. She also supported the protests against the first Iraq war in 1990-91. Those of course are just two in a lifetime of contributions to the cause of freedom and justice, from championing the blues as the musical expression of the African American experience to leafletting to defend the Rosenbergs to performing at the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights to singing with Paul Robeson.

Thank you, sister Odetta, for your life well lived.

Blogging is weird

If this were a more elegant (meaning not free) blog, there'd no doubt be a better way to design it, but as it is, with the latest entry piggybacking on top of the previous one, the effect is that whoever comes at it reads from the top down. Which makes for some weird mood swings, doesn't it? I guess I'm noting this here because I just looked at it and it appeared to me that I must be the most frivolous person in the world, first writing about possibly the most serious topic, AIDS, and then, tra-la-la, following with a goofy post about a goofy gift item. Of course that's not how it went at all, chronologically speaking. I wrote the goofy post late last night and the serious one this afternoon. (I could include the time of postings but that creeps me out like some stranger out there is tracking my every move.) But there it is. Insert here some profound comment about life's extremes.

World AIDS Day

I haven't read it carefully yet, but this looks like an interesting and possibly worthwhile article about the state of the AIDS crisis and of AIDS activism, 20 years after the first World AIDS Day. I remember walking down Christopher Street holding candles that first December 1, thinking about Bill and Marshall who were, if I'm remembering right, at that point the only friends of mine who'd died of AIDS. By a couple years later the number had multiplied and the struggle had intensified. By now, 20 years later, AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, somewhere around 35 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and in Africa, hardest hit of all, there are now 11.6 million AIDS orphans.

Remember, this is a preventable disease, and, increasingly a treatable one for those with access to lifesaving drugs--meaning those who can afford them. In Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribean (except Cuba, where there's free quality health care for all, and where a scientifically sound, nondiscrimatory policy instituted back in the early days made it the only country where the epidemic never got a foothold), and in the U.S. as well, especially in communities of color, approximately 6.7 million people are at imminent risk of death if they can't get treatment.

More than ever, the whole world round, the demand has to be: Make the greedy pharmaceutical companies free up the drugs! Make the Pentagon pay! Money to fight AIDS, not for imperialist wars!

(Statistics from UNAIDS/WHO as of July 2008)

How about them "apples"?

Speaking of how capitalism pushes commodities nobody needs and convinces everyone they need them: I can't decide if this is incredibly cheesy or something I simply must have.

elegant A Life Well Read “box set”

Yes I can. It's cheesy. It's not for me. And yet ... I'm drawn to it like gravy to mashed potatoes. It isn't even practical. My reading life is too messy, too sprawing and uncontainable for a container such as this. More to the point, let me be honest, I'm far too highminded a literary snob for the likes of this item, which is so so wrong in so many ways. And yet ... and yet ... something about it calls out to my inner 10-year-old madly pasting book stickers onto the library's summer reading contest log form.

Bottom line: the marketers have shot themselves in the foot. I will never respond to an ad that includes "box set." First of all, it's boxed, not box. And second, who are they quoting? Or are those ironical quotation marks, like, yeah, right, so-called box set. Methinks not. Worst of all, later on in the promotion, this item is dubbed "truly unique." Oh dear. Now they've really ticked me off.

For yes, I am the daughter of an English teacher, and yes I refuse to buy apples in the supermarket if the sign says "apples," and yes I cringe when anyone uses a modifier with the word unique, and yes I admit again I'm a book snob and no I'm not proud of it and no I don't think I'm better than anyone who will buy this product and still no I won't buy and yet no I won't refuse it if some misguided but loving family member gives it to me as an Xmas present and yes I'll smile and utter sincere thanks and yes my inner summer-reading-contest-winner might just jump for joy.